Chris's Blog Archive: July 2017

This month saw me nake a start on the challenge of writing fifty
songs in ninety days for the fifth consecutive year. Just to make
the challenge a bit harder, I decided that I'd also release a
high-resolution version of one song as a single on Bandcamp every
Saturday. I enjoyed coming up with a design for the cover of each
release almost as much as I did recording the music!

When I was a kid, my parents used to leave the light at the top of the
stairs on all night. My father still leaves the hall light on all the
time in his house. Maybe it's a reaction to this, but nowadays I find
it almost impossible to sleep in a light room. I like my sleeping
quarters to be as dark as possible.

Before I had my new windows fitted this week, I had to take down the
blackout roller blind in my bedroom, as it was attached to the old
wooden window frames. I won't be drilling holes in the new frames,
that's for sure - so I'll have to source an alternative method of
blacking out the room. At the moment it gets light here by 5 am, so
that's when I wake up, whether I want to or not. After a week of
rising early like this, I feel absolutely knackered. Those late
Winter sunrises can't come soon enough.

ANOTHER ONE

My hand has more or less healed after last week's unfortunate accident
with a broken glass, but I suspect I'm going to have a nice scar to show
for it. The good news is that I'm back playing the guitar again, so
I've resumed work on 50/90 and have also released the latest track for
my Saturday Single challenge. It's called
What
Happens Next Is Incredible. I'm rather pleased with this one.

Every three or four years since I moved here in 1995 I've had to spend
two or three days up a ladder, sanding down and repainting the woodwork
on the windows. The original frames were, I suspect, not particularly
high quality and they really haven't stood the test of time. That's been
particularly evident with the windows at the front of the house, which
faces South. Not only was the wood on these windows disintegrating, but
the seals on most of the panes had failed. If they had ever been
filled with an inert gas like Argon, it was long gone. In the winter
they would fill up with condensation and crud, which really didn't
look very nice at all and they didn't provide much in the way of
insulation against the cold. I knew that this year I'd have to go up
the ladder again, but I decided I'd had enough. So at Christmas, I
decided I'd treat myself to getting new windows installed by the end
of this year.

The work was completed this afternoon and as you can see above, the
new windows look rather swish. Switching the inside frames from dark
brown to white has made each room noticeably brighter, which is lovely.
The technology has changed quite a bit in 27 years, too. The gap between
the inner and outer panes of glass in the new windows looks to be more
than twice that of the old, and the spacers between the sheets of glass
these days are made of plastic rather than aluminium. The inside
surface of each pane has a low emissivity coating that is designed to
reflect heat back in to the building. All this means that the windows
are rated as A-2 for energy efficiency, so I'm expecting my heating
bills to be noticeably smaller this winter. That's no bad thing.

But I'm most pleased about the new windows' sound insulating properties.
When they're closed, most outside noise is inaudible. With the bedroom
window shut at night, I'm no longer being woken up at four in the
morning by the milkman's clattery old Ford Transit. Instead, I'm
sleeping through until 5 am, when it gets light. That's still way before
the alarm clock goes off, but it's a significant improvement. Believe
me, it's been worth the expense just for that.

While I was doing the washing up last night there was a loud crack as
the glass I was holding split into three very sharp pieces and cut a
two-inch gash down the side of the middle finger of my left hand. There
was blood everywhere, but I managed to not freak out (possibly because
the glass in question had recently contained a large gin and tonic.)
Eventually I managed to stick things back together without having to
visit the nearest A&E, but my fretting hand is now mostly Elastoplast
and my guitar technique has been somewhat compromised, to say the least.

Despite this, I have had a productive day and managed to record several
pieces of music for 50/90. As it's a Saturday, one of them has been
pressed into service as my latest single, and is now available over at
Bandcamp. Rather appropriately it's called
Two Fingers.

SYNERGY

It's well over a decade since I first discovered the music of Dominic
Robertson - who you may know as Ergo Phizmiz, and who is currently
enjoying a spectacular burst of creativity as his latest alter ego, the
Composter of Music -
and I've been a fan ever since, as evidenced by his multiple appearances
in this blog. Dominic is currently preparing his latest opera,
The
United Kingdom of Earth, and it looks like it's going to be a hoot.

I love it when my musical acquaintances discover each other's work, and
fellow FAWMer (and ace musician) Pete Murphy is a prime example. He's
been so taken with Dominic's approach to things that he's just released
an album of cover versions of Ergo's music, and it's absolutely bloody
marvellous. You can get your copy
here!

I've got a lot happening over the next few days so this week's Saturday
single is being released a day early. I hope you enjoy it, it's called
Troll.

ON THE WAY OUT?

There has been lots of chatter on the Internet over the last few days
concerning the future of Soundcloud, the service I use for hosting
the music that's embedded on this website. TechCrunch's report suggests
that despite making lots of people redundant this month, the longer
term prospects don't look good. The company reportedly only has enough
capital to take it into
the last quarter
of the current financial year.

As I wrote in the blog recently, I dumped Soundcloud's paid plan after
being increasingly frustrated by their inability to control spam and
scam artists; it looks like their problems run much, much deeper than
that. I won't be shedding any tears if they do go to the wall.

My brother will be visiting the UK next week, so I am taking the week
off. I plan on chilling out with family and generally trying to unwind
a bit.

Making my way home along the motorway last night I was struck by how
the weekend getaway has spread from the school holidays to include
pretty much every weekend during the summer. The amount of traffic
heading Westward was staggering. Last summer I switched to driving
back from work across country on Friday afternoons once the schools
broke up, but this year it looks like I need to start doing so earlier.
Are people staying in the UK for their holidays more after the Brexit
vote, I wonder?

TIME FOR A NEW SINGLE

The plan is that I'll release a single every Saturday between now and
the end of 50/90 on OCtober 1st. After seeing photos of Mike Pence
visiting NASA and pointedly
ignoring
the large sign that said "DO NOT TOUCH" in bright red lettering, this
one pretty much wrote itself.

For the last month or so I've been trying to get the house into better
shape. I've lived here for more than 22 years now, and over that time
I have accumulated an awful lot of stuff. I tend to hang on to things
for sentimental rather than practical reasons, and it's got to the point
where I don't have the space to do that any more. So, things have had
to change.

Over the last six weeks or so I've taken shopping bag after shopping
bag of books to the local charity collection point. I've recycled
several sacks of old clothes that I no longer wear. Some clutter has
gone into the recycling, and a fair amount has quite simply ended up
in the bin. There is far, far less stuff in the loft than there used
to be. All this probably hasn't made a difference that would be visible
to anyone else, but I can see an improvement and it feels good.

Today, with the help of one of my friends, I'm going to take my old
Panasonic television to be recycled. It's an old CRT model from the
days of analogue TV; I bought it before Freeview was even a thing,
so it must be nearly 20 years old. It weighs a ridiculous amount and
it's the size of a small fridge, so it has to go.

The house is way past due some TLC, too. It still retains the original
windows from when it was built in 1990, and the wooden frames are
fairly low-quality softwood. They really haven't stood the test of
time and exposure to the elements. The south-facing frames in
particular have been clobbered, and are well overdue for another
coat of paint. However, even if I could face spending another couple
of days up a ladder sanding and filling and painting everything, quite
a few of the seals on the windows themselves have failed. The panes are
beginning to fog up with nasty, unsightly gunk, so I'm having them all
replaced with uPVC ones and for good measure I'm getting new doors for
the front and back, too. It's all going to be fitted later this month.
I'm rather looking forwards to seeing the results.

It took me the best part of three hours to get home yesterday afternoon.
The UK's road network clogs up from lunchtime every Friday during the
summer at the best of times, but things weren't helped at all by the
fact that there was a Justin Bieber concert taking place in Cardiff
in the evening. The queue to leave the M4 motorway at junction 18
started shortly after Leigh Delamere services, and when I finally
got on to the A46, seven miles and the best part of an hour later,
the westbound motorway was stationary. According to the travel
bulletins, it was like that as far as the junction with the M48,
25 miles down the road...

This is why I try to avoid driving anywhere during the day.

"SPREADING LIKE GLUTEN INTOLERANCE"

Just like the rest of the Internet, I have become fascinated this week
by the postings of
InspiRobot, which generates a
bewildering stream of motivational memes (a pithy statement superimposed
on a photograph which may or may not be relevant to the text). It's the
brainchild of Peder Jorgensen, a
recording engineer and sound designer based in Oslo. Launched in
2015,
the site appears to use a neural network to generate content, but
instead of improving its behaviour over the last couple of years, it's
remained static - the humour and entertainment value become most
apparent on the frequent occasions when InspiRobot doesn't quite
get it, and actually teaching the AI to get things
right would absolutely spoil the fun. The results run the gamut from
delightful to disturbingly dark. Recommended.